It was such a joy to watch the Olympic games! I seem to have forgotten how great the Olympic spirit is for all the disciplines presented, that is: for all the disciplines except men’s football (the one where you play the ball with your foot, a.k.a. soccer).
I know why FIFA doesn’t want a competitor for a worldwide tournament with all the best athletes, but isn’t this just a monetary issue that could be solved? Wouldn’t the World Cup always be higher regarded, since it’s a single-discipline-event stretching a whole month?
What would substract from it if we have a smaller tournament in the year of the Summer Olympics, and move the continental cups like the Euros to the odd years 2029, 2033…? I would love to see world’s best footballers to be amongst other athletes and enjoy the spirit that an Olympic host city (like Paris!) can offer.
If you ask the athletes, they would surely love to. If you ask the fans, they would enjoy it as well, the only possible criticism being a little bit of a trophy inflation within that 4 years time span. But that’s still so much better than all of FIFA’s own inflationary ideas like Nation League, Club World Cup etc…!
Football is too big to be part of the Olympics, and I mean big in terms of viewership, importance, media coverage, and number of athletes and staff that needs to be accomodated. The Olympic tournament is conceived as some kind of u23 world championship and it’s fine as it is, it used to be like this for a lot of team sports up until the 90’s.
There’s a reason why it’s still like this, for two weeks all the sports which are basically sidelined and ignored for 4 years get to be o the spotlight and everybody gets to watch some disciplines they would never consider otherwise, and maybe some of them even start practising some of those sports.
Football, just like American football and cricket for example don’t really need that, for different reasons.
American football aside, I don’t see the mentioned “lot of team sports” that has restrictions as to who can compete, at least not nowadays. It works perfectly fine for basketball, handball, women’s soccer etc…
Sure, you would have to limit such a tournament to 12…16 teams. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from the sidelined sports, why not have both and expand the length of the Olympic games?
They do have a lot of restrictions. Nowadays even in “smaller” sports world tournaments are played by 24/32 teams, while they’re limited to only 12 team. And I’m referring to almost all of them, from basketball and volleyball, to field hockey, water polo and handball too. Football is the only sport having 16 teams. So it’s already like that.
It’s the FIFA which doesn’t want and can’t force clubs and National federations to consider Olympics as a bigger tournament. They make do with world Cup (which anyway has more spectators by itself than all the Olympic mayor sports combined). And don’t forget that football is much more centered on clubs rather than national teams. That’s another issue. Except for the WC and such tournaments, nobody cares about national teams at all.
As to expand the length of the Olympics I definitely agree, even two weeks longer. But with such a crammed schedule and so many events being held at the same time, I would rather reduce pressure and the number of sports included. Imagine how big of an effort it would be on the city hosting the event if they had to increase athletes by 30%/50%, make them stay longer, basically block the city for three weeks/ a month… Unfeasible
Thanks for your opinion, sounds reasonable. But I don’t think football is the sport that requires the most time between matches. It’s rather historically that you don’t have more than 1 match during the workdays, and that’s mostly an international one since the weekend is reserved for domestic league. When you look at NBA basketball with up to 4 games per week, I wouldn’t argue that it’s half the power needed compared to football. It’s rather that athletes got used to that rhythm and get compensated by at least 4 full months of recovery (current Olympics aside)!